A Garden For The Senses

Cooking with herbs that you’ve grown and picked yourself is very satisfying and surprisingly easy. The romance of wandering out into the garden and picking your own herbs is intoxicating.

- Louise Danks

A DEDICATED herb garden is a beautiful thing - but don’t underestimate the ornamental value of herbs: they have attractive foliage and pretty flowers. Many of the most commonly eaten herbs will have originated from warmer climes. Recreating those conditions in the garden, as closely as possible will help to ensure success, a sunny spot and good drainage are essential.

Weave them into your mixed borders, they are incredibly versatile; use them in pots (especially mint) where they’ll happily provide fresh herbs for your kitchen. The key to keeping the woody, shrubbier herbs such as sage, rosemary and thyme healthy is to prune them lightly but regularly while they are growing. This is easy to achieve if your herb garden is conveniently close to the kitchen making it easy to pop out while cooking to harvest what you need for a particular recipe. Best of all, you’ll be clipping the plants and encouraging them to produce new growth throughout the growing season.

The salad type herbs where a large quantity of leaves are needed for a salad or soup like sorrel, dill, fennel or salad rocket tend to be perennial, they’ll return every year and put on a good amount of growth during the growing season. The exception here is parsley, it’s biennial so don’t expect to keep it for years. Instead keep raising it from seed and you’ll always have plenty to hand.

Having enjoyed and consumed fresh, aromatic herbs all season, there are many ways to keep the flavours fresh even after the plants have stopped growing. Bunching and drying herbs for later use, freezing leaves in ice cube trays and making herb butters, oils and pestos are all ways to preserve the essence of the garden throughout the year.